The term e-commerce is used to refer to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted via e-commerce has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. As a result, a variety of websites have been established to offer goods and services. A common configuration for such a website is to present each individual good or service on a separate landing page. Such websites also typically organize the goods and/or services offered in a hierarchy and feature categories of goods and/or services on separate landing pages.
Search engines are useful tools for locating specific pages of information on the World Wide Web and are increasingly used to locate goods and services. As a result, many websites use search advertising/search engine marketing to attract visitors to product, service and/or category landing pages. Search advertising describes the placement of online advertisements adjacent or amongst the search results returned by a search engine in response to a specific search query. Search engine marketing typically involves paying for a specific online advertisement or creative to be featured in or adjacent to the search results provided in response to a specific query. The creative typically includes a link to a specific landing page. In many instances, the provider of the search engine derives revenue when a user of the search engine uses the link within the creative to navigate to the landing page. In addition, the amount of money paid is often the result of a bidding process. Typically, the position of an advertisement within the returned search results is a function of the bid scaled by a quality factor that measures the relevance of the creative and landing page combination to the search query. Accordingly, the provider of the search engine is incentivized to feature relevant keyword/advertisement/landing page combinations so that users will select featured advertisements and increase the revenue generated by the search engine provider. In the context of paid search advertising, the term keyword refers to both a single word and a specific combination of words or keyword components.
When a website includes a large number of products or services, the process of building and managing a paid search advertising campaign can be quite complex. Many search engines provide the ability to upload an entire campaign including one or more creatives that target a set of keywords, and associated bids to be used when the display of the creative is triggered by specific keywords. For example, Google, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., defines an Ad Group file format that enables advertisers to upload paid search advertising campaigns.
Leading search engine providers offer a variety of different match types when building a paid search advertising campaign. Keyword matching options or match types specify the similarity required between a keyword in a search query and a keyword specified in a paid search advertising campaign in order to trigger the display of a creative. Google, Inc. provides four different match types. “Broad match” matches keywords to similar phrases and relevant variations in a search query. “Modified Broad Match” is similar to “broad match”, but with the restriction that at least one specified keyword component or a close variant must match exactly within the search query. “Phrase match” requires that the keyword be present within the query exactly. “Exact match” requires that the keyword and the search query match exactly. In addition to the four match types, “negative matches” can also be specified to prevent a creative from being displayed when a specific keyword is present.